Even though the IRL world is blatantly copying WotA and looks like its about to come to an end, today is a celebration day ! The early access version of WotA has turned one year old so today, we're having cake !
The marathon isn't over of course, a big thank to all who have been supporting the game so far ːsummer2019flagː.
_met44
Have fun and be safe throughout those dangerous times. ps, quick little teaser regarding the next update v2.8: it will feature significant improvements to the AI of the game !
The Longest Journey Ever Update v2.7
Welcome back fellow Atlantean leader!
What can you expect from your best strategic and economic skills put in action ? Well expect that, and also more.
More incentive, more progress options, more rewards !
Behold, the long awaited brand new Quest System.
-- Each game, you are now offered 10 levels of quests with increasing difficulty and rewards. Each level is composed of 2 quests with a random objective and reward.
Objectives can be anything you do in the game, such as exploring, building cities, creating troops, battling, placing facilities and so on.
Rewards can be as insane as a permanent food upkeep or unique tech style bonus that's yours for the whole game duration, and as dull as a single production material for one of your cities.
Both quests of a given level can be completed but only one can ever be claimed so choose wisely.
Up to you to complete the objectives and select the reward best matching your current game.
All players in the game get same quests and rewards offered, and can all complete each ! You're never at a disadvantage because of a bad roll. --
There's also a new way to visualize the fragility of surrounding tiles instantly, press Left Alt to bring it up. Red means the tile is (*drum rolls*) fragile and is very much likely to go down fast when the tidal wave hits.
Gameplay
- New Quest System - Pressing left alt now toggles an overlay tinting from green to red showing areas fragility (not health)
UI
- HUD is now shorter, focused in center
Effects
- Added cam shake at the end of grace period
Bug Fixes
- Fixed forest destruction dust vanashing abruptely too early - Numerous misc bug fixes
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm the Iron Man the long awaited update 2.7 is now publicly available !
_met44
Masters of Landscaping Update v2.6
Hello Steam !
This update brings the long awaited missing planned facilities.
The Factory features a really cool burning inferno of molten iron visual and works similar to crops, it increases it's owning city production material generation after 1 minute.
Docks on the other hand have a unique capability. Knowing the world was crumbling down your architects have been busy working on a way to strengthen the land.
After countless days of research it appeared the best way was to build docks preventively. It strengthens the tile it gets built on, making it far less fragile after 2 minutes of filling in bricks.
While the dock ablity is quite powerful, it will break at some point and does not yield any resource or combat bonus so spaming your territory will hinder your ability to respond to competing players juggling with other facilities.
Gameplay
- Added the new Factory facility to build around your cities
- Added the new Docks facility to build around your cities
Technologies
- Added new facility tech to unlock the Factory
- Added new facility tech to unlock the Docks
Balancing
- Troops now cost 2 production material and 3 food to create
Misc
- Can now see facilities through clouds on the rim of the visible area
Feel free to come on the hub to share your fun WotA stories, would love to hear how the new facilities are changing your habits too !
_met44
Network Like a Beaver Update v2.5
Hello Steam !
Today's update takes multiplayer to a whole new level.
Multiplayer clients use to suffer from several parts of the game not looking the way it should, and while the game was usuable it was indeed a disadvantage to be the client in a multiplayer game due to limited visual feedback.
Clients will now see everything in game just as anyone else, including planned army actions (even chained actions), every little bit of info you can see through clouds around your visible area. Replay map at the end of the game is now also complete for clients !
Usage of the lobby has also been improved, so you can see when people are playing even if they are in game already and also join back a game you've been disconnected from !
There's also a bunch of new graphics options, in case you'd like to change the scale of UI for example or standard things such as resolution, fullscreen etc.
There's more listed right here:
Multiplayer
- Clients now receive the whole action chain after giving an order to their armies (i.e. when giving a colonize order, you see the colonizing areas before the army finishes moving and begins the actual colonize action)
- Now syncing replay data to clients when they finish the game
- It is now possible to join back a game after exiting it (in case of computer or internet reboot for example)
- Now showing already started public lobbies as unjoinable, showing "STARTED..." instead of the join button, except if able to late join due to being a member of the lobby before
- More fine grain area data syncing, less bandwidth wastage and fixes issues with late joining players not receiving some data properly
- Kicking player should now update lobby members correctly
- Players leaving lobby now warn others properly they left to update lobby members correctly
- Fixed rim of fog of war not showing the tiles underneath for clients
Visuals
- Now flashing tiles that can be colonized to further emphasis those have to be targeted by the colonize action and not the nearby tiles
UI
- All UI in the game can now be scaled with the new UI Scale graphics option
Balance
- Cities no longer provide an extra defense bonus (use to be x2 strength to the defending army)
- Fixed some achievements not working properly
- Fixed max player option not getting set properly when creating a multiplayer lobby
- Fixed empire menu not displaying city gains including empire bonuses
Performance
- Optimized some of the materials used by city elements
- Slightly simplified some city buildings
More content that was close to ready but not quite yet had to be cut off for now as those fixes were deemed very important to put in your hands as soon as possible, feel free to expect cool stuff comming out next update !
Please let us know about your experiences in multiplayer, are your friends yelling badly when loosing land to the ocean like mine are ?
This version is not compatible with older ones for multiplayer games.
_met44
Attack to the Future Update v2.4
Hey Steam !
This is a short one you're gonna enjoy <3.
Minimap and replaymap icons are back in, no longer crashing the game and... looking great now ! City icons are even colored with their owner's color.
Frontiers, colonizing tiles and other relevant visuals are now properly rendered behind troops and such tall objects. Frontier visibility through forests remains as it is there on purpose for the gameplay. That makes the game both prettier and easier to read and make sens while not loosing visibility in any significant way.
Some issues that were preventing chained attack actions from performing properly have been fixed. Doing so becomes a no brainer to anyone finding they have to micro too much ! (note: to chain actions first select the action in action bar, then hover the target area and press shift + click to stack orders until you're ready to give the final order with a simple click)
Last but not least, attacking a not defended tile is now significantly much faster, and even more so if the attacking army has a lot of troops.
This enables you to wipe out entire empires within a game's timeframe, but also means you might need to consider guarding your frontiers !
Overall the game looks and feels like never before, hope you enjoy ! Also there's more listed bellow:
Visuals
- Now showing (again) new cities and battle icons on the minimap and replay map
- Now tinting city icons on minimap and replay map with their owning player color
- Minimap camera now smoothly grows when discovering the world instead of bumping to new size instantly
- Minimap now has a parchment background look for unknown tiles
- Minimap's viewport border visual is now more accurate
- Setup things to render in proper order like units above frontier and colonization visuals etc
- Army path now has a nicer looking texture, also shows a cross on target tile when doing movement only action
- Made the selected area visual even higher
Balance
- Attacking undefended territories is now much faster
Performance
- Trimmed spawned tiles around the viewport to the bare minumum, lowering the need (and cost) of culling
- Erosion now has a burst limit of 10 areas destroyed per frame, wont affect gameplay in any significant way but should alleviate hicups in extreme cases
AI
- AI will now more specifically target cities for attacks over any other type of tile (and just to clarify, it can still happen and just will be less frequent)
Bug Fixes
- Fixed some cases that prevented chained attack actions to perform (note: attacking in unknown or uncrossable territory is still not possible per game rules)
- Fixed some achievement stats not working in builds
- Fixed facilities visuals not cleared out when their city is destroyed
- Fixed some cases of minimap tiles not updated correctly
As always, thank you so much to everyone providing feedback. Feel free to join us on Discord, Twitter or the hub here on Steam !
_met44
Crash in the Pan Update v2.3
Hello Steam !
This new update comes in a little early because of a crash that has been occuring that needed urgent fixing. That crash started occuring when the engine was updated in v2.2 for unrelated reasons and went unnoticed until recently.
Be assured that the whole team at Metaphore Games is being violently slapped with slippers as punishment.
The aforementioned crash is occuring in the engine code which I cannot fix on my end, I have however been able to identify its specific location and thus, setup a work around. In this build you will not see cities and battles in the minimap and as well as in the new endgame replay map feature (real bummer, was quite fun to watch after a game !).
Fear not for this is only a temporary solution, and as soon as a new version of the engine with a fix for this is available there will be a new build that enables it back. I hope you all understand and agree this is the best solution at this time. The team at Unity is very responsive and I have high hopes this will be sorted out quickly.
Now about the meat of the update
It comes with a grand 32 new achievements listed bellow ! (and yes typing those labels was quite fun)
There's also as mentionned a replay map shown on the game over screen so you can see what everyone has been up to during the game. This feature is not fully implemented for MP clients yet.
WotA is blessed with really great musics from Thomas George Music aka @TLATWuk on twitter. He his a great artist, very listening and involved, I hope you all appreciate his work !
When selecting an army, you're finally going to see which one it is you selected.
Frontiers and colonizing tiles visuals now benefit from a new see through improved shader, it respects transparency of the base texture allowing to preserver width of the frontier and properly show the color of each player in the of frontier shared with another player.
And there's more all listed bellow:
Gameplay
(achievements will be posted later today)
- New achievements: Four Stars General 1 to 4, gather lots of troops in a single army
- New achievements: Troop Hoarder 1 to 4, total troops created throughout all your games
- New achievements: Land Lord 1 to 4, biggest territory size in a single game
- New achievements: Cern Scientist 1 to 4, win with as many technologies as you can (level 4 will be unlockable in a future update)
- New achievements: Pro Roulette Player 1 to 4, win against the AI as many times as possible
- New achievements: Social Hacker 1 to 4, win against other players in multiplayer as many times as possible
- New achievements: Mukbang Streamer 1 to 4, highest upkeep ever reached in a game
- New achievements: Iron Man* 1 to 4, Win the game with as much food upkeep as you can (*as in a regular, legit, man made of iron, not some popular IP with my favorite character and that I have no right to use, obviously)
UI
- Added on the gameover screen a map showing the full replay of the game, can be speed up, paused, resumed and also browsed using the progress bar underneath
Sound
- New (awesome) musics from Thomas George Music, @TLATWuk on twitter
Visuals
- Moved atmospheric clouds that were in the center of the screen to the side
- Now showing a visual over selected army troops !
- Updated the selected tile visual to somewhat match with the selected army one
- New improved see through shader for frontiers, respecting the base texture transparency in see through parts, making frontiers remain at the proper width and also with accurate colors for both frontiers in case of neighbouring with another player
- More relatable visual for the army colonizing tiles visuals, also uses the new see through shader instead of being fully overlayed (no longer shows up above clouds yet is well visible through forests)
- Slightly increased camera shake range when erosion occurs since it seemed no longer effective
- Tweaked defensive forts materials to be more in harmony
Performance
- Lowered vertices of ocean in intro scene to work better on lower end hardware
- Now using a merged version of the crops model when completed to spare draw calls compared to the "growing" version
Bug fixes
- Fixed show mp invite in SP option off by default and not saved to playerprefs
- Fixed food 3 tech icon
- Fixed engine time not stopped when in pause menu in SP so that animations and other relevant systems being stop visibly moving
- Fixed case of city menu not closing when target area is no longer owner or is destroyed
- Fixed improper behaviour when an army colonized tile with an occupying army, it was leaving both armies on the tile instead of merging it
I also want to sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that crash issue may have caused you when trying to play over the last few days.
As always, thank you so much to everyone providing feedback. Feel free to join us on Discord, Twitter or the hub here on Steam !
_met44
Chinese language hotfix v2.2
Hey Steam !
It appears some of our fellow Chinese players have issues with the workshop.
To circumvent the issue Chinese has been made available by default in the game and has been removed from the translation pack on the workshop.
Additionnaly, here is a quick rundown of how to grab languages from the workshop in Waves of the Atlantide:
- On the main menu, click on the flag on the side of the logo
- If your the language you desire isn't already listed, click the "More" button
- Search for your language in the workshop and subscribe to it
- Back in game your language should be immediatly available, if not try opening closing the localization menu or restarting the game
- Click on your desired language to select it
Feel free to come ask for help on the hub or discord if you have any struggle, we'll get it sorted out quickly !
Regards,
_met44
One Million Copies Update v2.2
Hey Steam,
What an insane ride this has been so far ! Huge thanks to everyone who has been helping out to get there.
Today the workshop opens up, with support for community translations ! The workshop being an amazing tool and considering how modular WotA is, expect some cool additions to what you can publish to enhence and customize the game !
French is officially supported, and 6 other languages, Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish are made available immediatly -but- from google translations. If you are fluent in a non officially supported language please help your fellow people by making that language available on the workshop ! A guide is available here.
As previously stated there will be many achievements to challenge you and now there are 9 new ones, testing your offensive and economic skills as well as one that is an extreme time challenge.
There are several other improvements to the game itself, the expedition menu shown when giving orders to an army has been simplified to only show the total duration of the expedition.
Two new selection actions to quickly go to defending or attacking battles are now available.
There is also a widget that appears on the right of the screen when you are attacked, it shows how many battles you're currently defending. You can also click it to reach each battle quickly. That will make micro managing battle a lot simpler and prevent letting attacks slip through while being busy elsewhere !
The engine version has also been updated with a major update, hence the size of this update. The overall size of the game is now smaller, and following updates should be a lot more optimized. Tests of that new engine version have been great so far but if you were to experience any weird behaviour please report ASAP.
Changelog:
Workshop
- First workshop iteration ! It is now possible to submit translations to the workshop, see publishing guide.
- Localization: French is now officially available
- Localization: As a getting things started thing Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish generated from Google Translate are available in the "Translation Pack"
UI
- Setup localizations, menu have a flag icon that can be clicked to bring up the localization menu showing all installed languages, as well as a link to translations that you can subscribe to on the workshop
- Trimmed the army expedition info UI to only show the duration, improved positionning formula
- Added next battle attacking and defending menu buttons
- Action bar hotkeys displayed are now dynamicly matching what is used by the underlying input layer
- Setup defending battles widget, showing how many attacks are currently directed at the local player
Gameplay
- It is no longer possible to use action bar shortcuts to break the progress in the tutorial
- New Achievement: Baby Killer, defeat an AI of any difficulty, on a map of any size before erosion begins
- New Achievements: Warmonging 1 to 4, throw simulatenous attacks to unlock this
- New Achievements: Mad Scientist 1 to 4, finish the game with a lot of unspent science points to unlock
Bug fixes
- Fixed AI able to form city right next to another one in some cases (if city control was lost but left unclaimed)
Performance
- Set musics to load in background
Misc
- Updated project to Unity v2019.1.0f2
- Updated logo in intro (finally)
As always, thank you so much to everyone providing feedback. Feel free to join us on Discord, Twitter or the hub here on Steam !
_met44
By the Graves I Saw the Storms Update v2.1
Hello Steam !
This update brings some new technologies, allowing for more production material or food generation per city on one hand, and on the other allowing armies to move or colonize significantly faster.
Alongside those newly added techs, others have been balanced to make the exploration branch a more interesting option.
Battles no longer suffer from some long standing issues.
It now get resolved faster, so taking over enemy territory will be easier to achieve. Defending also becomes slightly more challenging due to having less time to react in case of attack, thus planning defenses becomes that much more important.
Differences in battle resolution while having or not a defending army are now streamlined. When there is a defending army in the battle, the battle progress is calculated from the health of all involved armies.
Bringing in troops now changes the progress of the battle instantly ! That fixes some odd behaviour in specific cases and hopefully will make battle resolution crytal clear to everyone.
Here's the full changelog:
Gameplay
- It is no longer possible to cancel the battle army action with right click when army is the defending army, only way to give up now is to move the army elsewhere
- Streamlined battle progress calculation between battles with or without a defending army, battle progress is now bound to health of armies involved when there is a defending army
- Bringing reinforcement in battle on both sides is now immediatly taken into account, for example battles cannot be won half a second after just because progress was very low before reinforcement so it is now always safe to send reinforcements
Balance
- Battles without a defending army will now be resolved a lot faster
- Lowered army default health by 20% to shorten duration of battles involving lots of troops
- Bumped Exploration lv 1 faster movement tech to 15% (from 10%)
- Bumped Exploration lv 1 faster colonization tech to 15% (from 10%)
Technologies
- Added level 5 production techs: +3 prod per city VS 3 Food per city
- Added level 3 exploration techs: 15% faster movement VS 25 % faster colonization
UI
- Moved down one slot the exit buttons so that it cannot be clicked by accident when pressing back quickly from other menus
- New or improved icons for several technologies
- Fixed a couple typos in tutorial
Multiplayer
- Now showing online players in main menu, only above 10
Bug fixes
- Fixed regression with colonizable areas display, now properly highlights only areas that can be colonized (ones which expand current territory)
With balance heavy updates, it is very important that I get as much feedback as possible so please keep posting videos and comments on the hub, twitter or discord !
_met44
The Clouds that Danced Hotfix v2.0b
Hey Steam !
Here goes a little hotfix for yesterday's update.
Placing facilities as client in multiplayer didn't work in some cases, that is now fixed alongside the yield icon not showing up as it becomes ready.
As a bonus something that I've been meaning to introduce for some time, an element in the HUD that shows how long until the next food tick.
There are also a few more bug fixes that I had been working on, all listed bellow:
Visuals
- Now showing a timer for the food gains in hud
Balance
- Streamlined game time calculations to prevent latency from affecting production results
Bug Fixes
- Fixed army colonizing area not gaining the eventual resource loot on it
- Fixed placing facilities as mp client not always working
- Fixed mp clients not receiving resource data from start of game
- Fixed mp clients not showing the facility completed effet
This version is not compatible with older version for multiplayer games, if you play today make sure your friend update as well !
Big thanks to the testers who discovered and reported this issue !
_met44
ps: the patchnotes for the main update can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/992210/announcements/detail/1629650588161543668
